It is often said that all truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident. Yesterday with the publishing of a new paper out of Israel, and two centuries later, Lamarck’s pre Darwinian theory of evolution, sometimes referred to as the inheritance of acquired characteristics, prophetically completed the cycle. Read more
When an article begins with the statement that “The theory of evolution by natural selection is among the best established in science,” you know the author won’t be defending that claim but rather will be assuming it as a given. You also know the author, in this case psychology professor Tania Lombrozo at the University of California, Berkeley, is sufficiently distant from evolutionary theory such that facts won’t confuse the message. Even committed evolutionists have long since admitted that natural selection, at best, can only be one of several modes of evolutionary change. In fact biological adaptations we can observe are dominated by rapid, directed change in response to environmental challenges, not slow, random change accumulated via natural selection as Read More ›
Evolutionary thought did not begin nor end with Charles Darwin. To be sure Darwin was its most important exponent, but evolutionary thinking goes back centuries before 1859 when Darwin first published his book on evolution, and it continued to develop long after Darwin. For example, for all his theorizing Darwin had little idea how biological variation—a crucial, fundamental component of evolutionary theory—actually occurs. How do species change to begin with? About half a century later evolutionists constructed neoDarwinism which added to Darwin’s theory the idea that random genetic mutations provided the needed biological variation which occasionally hit upon improvements which would be preserved via natural selection. Indeed, according to evolution, whales, oak trees, and humans all must have been created Read More ›
A commenterrecently reminded meof one of the many fundamental fallacies of evolutionary thought. When I point out problems with evolution, and make arguments against evolutionary thought, it is not because I am against the idea or want it to be false. Life would be much easier if the evidence simply supported evolution, if evolutionary thought was a stellar example of intellectual progress, if—to put it simply—evolution was an undeniable scientific fact, just as evolutionists insist. But it’s not. Evolution is not any of those. Evolution is not supported by the empirical evidence, it is not a rational, intellectual movement, and it is not a scientific fact, undeniable or otherwise. I’m not grinding a personal ax here, I’m simply pointing out Read More ›
Remember those micro flies which are practically invisible? Well perhaps even more amazing are the micro frogs from the island of New Guinea which at their largest are about … Read more
We recently reported that the common squid, Doryteuthis pealeiirecodes, uses massive, tissue-specific, RNA editing to modify many of its proteins. One evolutionary explanation for this apparent intelligent design would be that the editing machinery is merely an uncontrolled, random process. This would be in keeping with evolution’s view of life as a train off the tracks and many past findings were initially described as vestigial or junk, until the design could no longer be denied. One current example is the finding that most of the human genome is transcribed. Apparently it is functional, and so isn’t mostly junk, but one evolutionary explanation that continues to have currency is that the transcription machinery is uncontrolled and has gone wild. Read more
Remember when evolutionists stated that information flow proceeds from DNA to RNA to proteins? They called it the “Central Dogma” and they envisioned DNA mutations providing the fuel for natural selection to create the species. Then there was reverse transcriptase, a protein machine that inserted RNA into DNA. And then there was alternative splicing where protein machines rearranged RNA. And there was RNA editing, where proteins … Read more
Ever wonder what the scientific evidence says about evolutionary theory? Have doubts about evolutionist’s claim that the data unequivocally support evolution, making if a fact beyond all reasonable doubt? Well have a look for yourself at the newDarwinsPredictions site and see how the objective science compares with evolution’s predictions. Read more
One of the powerful evidences for evolution is the DNA code, at least according to evolutionists. The DNA code is essentially the same across all of life and, evolutionists explain, there is no reason for such universality. The code is ubiquitous across all life, but it is not special or unique. It is a mundane code, like any other, which just happened to evolve early in evolutionary history. But once in place it could not evolve, so it has been preserved ever since. In other words, the DNA code is the result of contingency, not law. As usual the evolutionary reasoning makes no sense. There is no credible, scientific, explanation for how a code could arise spontaneously in some primitive Read More ›
Ever wonder who those peer reviewers are who approve of the non scientific evolution papers which claim that the world arose spontaneously? Well now we know one of them is professor James McInerney who has come cleanas a reviewer of Thijs Ettema’s latest paper which makes the rather startling claim—with McInerney’s full approval—that complex archaea “bridge the gap” between prokaryotes and eukaryotes and share a common ancestry with eukaryotes. That is quite a claim. What Ettema and co-workers discovered was an archaeal phylum they have named “Lokiarchaeota,” after the mythological Norse deity Loki. The moniker is fitting both because the new microorganism was discovered near Loki’s Castle—an area of active hydrothermal vents in the north-Atlantic—and because Loki is, as Stefanie Read More ›
It’s no secret that the biological world contains all manner of complicated and finely-tuned machines and mechanisms. Even evolutionists admit that life has the appearance of design. But it doesn’t stop there. Biology, for instance, rests on a foundation of chemistry, and there too we find all kinds of fascinations. At the atomic level, matter and its interactions have specific and particular properties that result in a vast set of crucial puzzle pieces. There are the positive and negative ions, such as sodium and chlorine, which result in molecules with ionic bonds, such as salt. There are atoms that can accept or donate electrons, such as carbon, which result in life’s macromolecules, such as carbohydrates and fats. Even quantum mechanics, Read More ›
Most people have heard of genes, but few understand how they work. The textbooks say that the human genome has almost 30,000 genes and that a gene typically is used to create a protein molecule. But in fact it is difficult to speak of a gene as a thing. For example, proteins are usually not simply constructed from a given stretch of DNA that we would call a gene. Instead, proteins are constructed from several different stretches of DNA. In other words, our “genes” are often a collection of smaller segments that are separated in our DNA. These different DNA segments, which are given the uninteresting name of exons for “expressed regions,” are first copied, and then the copies are combined or Read More ›
There is a reason why Aristotle’s ideas persisted for thousands of years—they advance fundamental themes in how we think. And no, those ideas did not become outdated with the rise of modern science, as the textbooks explain. Consider a recent paper on the flight of bats which stated that the bat’s specialized airflow sensors evolved in order “to guide motor behaviors” and that vertebrate nervous systems, in general, “have flexibly adapted to accommodate anatomical specializations for flight.” The infinitive form is the key. Evolutionary theory is supposed to have rejected teleology. Whereas Aristotle explained natural phenomena as a consequence of final causes, modern science, so the textbooks state, is free of such mysteries. After Bacon it was all about empiricism, mathematical descriptions and Read More ›
It happened this morning at 9:13 AM, a moment I shall never forget. The historians had always told us this day would come, but it just seemed impossible. Yes spontaneous origins seems absurd, they agreed, but the inexorable march of science will find it out. It always does. Don’t get in the way of science they warned, and now they have turned out right. And we are too loyal pupils of inductive philosophy to resist any conclusion by reason of its strangeness. Newton’s patient philosophy taught him to find in the falling apple the law which governs the silent movements of the stars in their courses. And if evolutionists can with the same correctness of reasoning demonstrate Epicureanism to be Read More ›
Zack Kopplin is the face of rational thought. Kopplin is a bright, energetic young man opposing the forces of anti intellectualism and ignorance that deny science and the fact of evolution, and seek to inject religious beliefs into the public schools. There’s only one problem. While we are delighted to see young people get involved in public policy issues, Kopplin is feverishly promoting precisely what he claims to be opposing. Read more